A typical communication system is made up of nodes, including switching systems, which are interconnected by so-called links including transmission facilities. When such a communication system is arranged to include a hierarchical arrangement of subnetworks, or domains, there is a need to advertise, i.e., to distribute, the topologies of the sub-networks in a compact manner. One such communication system is the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) system. Usually, the relevant topology information to be advertised is the value of some network topology parameter, for example, delay, available bandwidth, usage cost, distance, or the like, related to traversing the network between so-called border nodes. Note that a border node is one having a link to a node outside the sub-network. For an accurate representation of the network topology parameters, the number of values that should be advertised is quadratic in the number of border nodes. If the number of values to be advertised can be reduced, there will be a corresponding reduction in the cost of storing, advertising and calculating routing based on the values. However, the compression of the number of the topology parameter values required to realize these advantages introduces errors, i.e., distortion, between the advertised and real value of the network parameter between some of the border nodes.